Untidy Murder Page 9

  “Where you think you’re going?” he said. He shook her. “You ain’t going nowhere,” he told her. “You’re sticking around, lady.”

  He marched her back to the car, walking behind her, keeping both hands on her upper arms. Piper was still standing by the car, holding his hand to his mouth. He took his hand away as they came up, looked at it and said, “Jeez. It’s bleedin’.” Then he put his hand back, and looked over it at Dorian. She could not see the expression in his eyes because it was too dark, but she knew she did not want to see it.

  “In the house,” Farno said. “You waiting to get invited?” He laughed unpleasantly. “Who you think’s going to invite you?” he said. He laughed again.

  Piper went ahead, walking along the road. The car, she saw, had been pulled off the road, at a place where there was, faintly visible, an opening among the trees and bushes and almost imperceptible tracks leading away. The car was only a little way off the road. Piper went along the road a short distance and then turned off it to the right. He was on a path, Dorian discovered when, still being impelled by Farno’s hands, she came to it. Farno turned her down it. It was only a few steps to a small house, brown-sided, screened on all sides by trees and bushes, now only darker shapes in the increasing darkness.

  Piper went across the porch of the little house and pushed at the door. He turned.

  “Locked,” he said.

  “What the hell’d you expect?” Farno said. “Open it up.”

  Piper pushed at the door again and then came off the porch. He tried the window on the right of the door and crossed and tried the one on the left. Then, trying windows as he went, he continued on around the house.

  “Bright guy, ain’t he?” Farno said. Dorian did not answer. Then there was the sound of breaking glass, and a minute or so later the front door opened and Piper stood in it.

  “Had to break a window.” Piper said.

  “Ain’t he a bright guy?” Farno said again, and pushed Dorian toward the door.

  Farno seemed more angry than he had before, Dorian thought. He pushed her through the door and took his hands from her arms. She staggered for a moment in the darkness, and then felt the other man—the little dark man—grab her. His hands were small and hard.

  Bill Weigand stood looking down at the body. His face was set and expressionless. It was an ugly thing to look at; as always when he saw murder, Bill was angry. He felt a kind of hard rage at the person who had done this. But now he was frightened, too. Fear was a kind of coldness which ran everywhere through him. It was something he could feel in the coldness of his fingertips.

  It was hard to realize that the St. John girl—Vilma St. John, aged about 20—had been pretty once, with a baby’s prettiness, with the high round forehead and soft round chin which went with a baby’s face. They weren’t pretty after they had been strangled. It would be hard to recognize her if you had known her before and, actually, they had as yet no real identification. But there was no doubt in Bill Weigand’s mind; there was no doubt in anybody’s mind. Vilma St. John had known something that was too dangerous to know and had been killed for knowing it. She had, the medical examiner’s man thought, been killed about four hours before he saw her, and he had seen her at eleven. So at a guess—his guess—she had been killed about seven, which was about the time she had expected to get on a train for a camp up-State. Murder had intervened, but what shape murder had, what murder had said or promised to get her here—those things they had to find out. Murder had not helped them; murder had strangled with hands, but the hands were in gloves. Murder had not left anything, not even a little blue flower. That much they were already, at eleven-thirty, pretty sure of.

  Bill Weigand’s mind worked at its job as he stood looking down at the body. It added what they knew, planned how they would find out what they had to know. But under that smooth professional working of his mind, a thought ran over and over: Two women knew something and one of them is dead and the other missing. Two women knew something and one of them is dead. The fear, the coldness ran with that thought.

  Mullins and Stein had come with Weigand and now they stood in the small living room—the very crowded small living room—and waited. A photographer came in and looked at Bill and Bill said, “Right, get on with it,” and stood out of the way. The photographer, already later than he should have been, got on with it briskly. And other men, some of them in uniform and some not, came and went. They talked to a detective lieutenant from Brooklyn Headquarters, and told him what they knew and went where he told them.

  Nobody had yet been found who had heard anything, or seen anything. Nobody had seen Vilma St. John come in that evening, alone or accompanied. Nobody had seen anybody peering at the names in the little foyer looking for hers; nobody had heard a bell ring in her apartment, although the people who lived above often heard the bell ring and, when they listened, heard voices. They had been there, and had this evening heard neither bell nor voices. It was not altogether surprising nor was it particularly suggestive. It raised the probability that murder had come with the girl, not before or after; it raised the probability that the girl had been killed before she had a chance to say anything, or to scream. Once hands were on her throat, she wouldn’t scream. The hands had been quick and efficient. The fact that she had had a drink or two might have made their task easier.

  Eddies went out from the room in which the girl’s body still lay. The investigation in the neighborhood was the first and nearest eddy. Beyond that there were others. They had found no railroad ticket among Vilma St. John’s things in the first quick search, but that did not mean she had not bought a ticket. It did not mean that she had not been in Grand Central earlier, and might not have been seen there. So, with still damp reproductions of a photograph of her they had found in the flat, detectives worked patiently through Grand Central, knowing the overwhelming chance that they would be greeted everywhere with shaking heads, hoping that somewhere—at a ticket window, at a train entrance—a head would nod. And other detectives began a laborious backtracking on Vilma St. John’s brief life.

  The body was gone, the congestion in the little flat had lessened, by a quarter to twelve, but Bill Weigand and Mullins and Stein, and the detective lieutenant from Brooklyn Headquarters, continued to wait. At ten minutes to twelve, a moment after the Brooklyn lieutenant had looked at Weigand with sharply raised eyebrows and Bill had said, “We’ll give her till twelve,” Alicia Hanlon came home. She was red-headed, not particularly pretty, very much alive. The aliveness drained out of her when they told her about Vilma.

  “No!” she said “It can’t be! I don’t believe it.”

  She did believe it after a time, and then she cried tempestuously for a few minutes, and then she was furiously angry. She said things all of them had heard before—why weren’t they doing something. Why didn’t they get—and she described, in the words a man would use, the person they were to get. The words made the object of their search masculine, which proved nothing. A girl wasn’t safe in her own apartment! What kind of a city was this.… They waited, and she ran down. She looked at them and said she was sorry. She said, “Hell, she was a swell kid,” and they nodded and went on waiting. She cried again then, more quietly, and now about Vilma and not about her own surprise and fear. Then she answered questions. Most of them were part of the backtracking.

  She had known Vilma St. John for about two years. They had worked in the same office, not that of Esprit, during the tail end of the war. She, Alicia, had been living at home and was tired of it. Vilma had found an apartment—this apartment—and wanted someone to share it with her. They had been in it for eighteen months.

  They had got along, by tolerance and by arrangement. They had shared the cleaning, most of it on Saturday morning; they had had coffee and orange juice together in the mornings. Perhaps once a week they had brought food home in the evening and cooked a joint meal. Mostly they ate their dinners separately—at cafeterias, at Nedick stands, at drug store counters—and came
home afterward. If one of them had a date, the other made a point of not coming home, but went to a movie instead. Now and then they had double dates.

  “Did Miss St. John ever have a date with a man named Wilming?” Weigand asked. “He worked at the magazine. He was an editor.”

  The girl hesitated. Then she shook her head.

  “He didn’t come here,” she said. “Not that I know of. I don’t know everybody she knew.”

  “Of course not,” Weigand said. “Didn’t she ever say anything about a Mr. Wilming?”

  “He was an older man?”

  “Yes.”

  Alicia Hanlon thought about it.

  “You think he’s the one?” she said.

  “No,” Bill told her. “He’s dead too. He—it seems likely somebody pushed him out of a window.”

  The Brooklyn detective looked at him in surprise. You didn’t tell people things; you had them tell you things. Bill saw the look, smiled faintly, shook his head faintly.

  “She didn’t!” Alicia said. “I tell you—”

  She stopped, because now Bill Weigand was shaking his head at her.

  “You don’t understand, Miss Hanlon,” he said. He was very patient, very reasonable, as if he were talking to an older person. “No one thinks Miss St. John had anything to do with Mr. Wilming’s death. We’re afraid she may have known something about it.” He paused, letting it sink in. “Too much about it,” he added.

  The girl’s blue eyes widened. They looked afraid.

  “I don’t know anything,” she said. “I didn’t see her since this morning. I didn’t see her at all after.” “After” meant later, any time later. Weigand nodded. “I was out with this man,” she said. “We went to dinner and to the Music Hall and then—then we stopped for a beer. I didn’t see anybody.”

  She was not in it, Bill told her, patiently. They knew she was not in it. They had to find out what they could about Vilma St. John. That was all. She still was sure Vilma had not said anything about Wilming? About anybody else at the office? About anything—well, call it odd—at the office?

  “Maybe there was somebody,” Alicia said. “An older man. Most of the people there didn’t see a girl, she said, but this man was different. He wanted her to go to lunch, once.”

  “Did she?”

  “I guess so. Why wouldn’t she?”

  There was no reason why she wouldn’t, Bill said. She hadn’t mentioned this man’s name?

  “Maybe she did,” Alicia said. “Maybe it was this man Wilming. What did you say he was? An editor?”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe she did,” Alicia said. “She wouldn’t say much, because of Joe. She’d be afraid I’d forget and say something when—” She stopped again.

  You had to be patient with the Alicia Hanlons. That was because you were police. If you were a policeman, you were on the cops. You might be like anybody else; some of the boys a girl grew up with went on the cops. But they wore uniforms, rode in radio cars, walked beats. They were the policemen, and like anybody else, good and bad. The police were different. It was a different kind of thing. Bill knew this. He knew that it was an attitude which made information hard to get—meaninglessly hard to get. You were careful when you dealt with the police, if you were Alicia Hanlon. There was no reason for this; almost certainly there was no reason for this. The police were no threat to you, and had never been. But still you were careful.

  “When Joe was around?” he said. “I see, Miss Hanlon. Joe was a special friend?”

  “Sort of,” the girl said. “A boy friend. I think he wanted them to get married.”

  “How did she feel about it?”

  “All right, I guess. Only what was the rush?”

  “Right,” Bill said. “Joe wouldn’t have liked her to go out with another man, though? Like this man at the office? This editor?”

  “Listen, lieutenant,” Alicia said, “I don’t want to get anybody into trouble. You’re trying to get me to say things.”

  “No,” Bill said. “We have to find out, Miss Hanlon. Nobody’ll get in trouble who hasn’t got it coming.” He paused. “You think the man who killed Vilma has got it coming, don’t you?”

  “I certainly do,” the girl said. “I certainly do, at that.”

  “That’s all we want,” Bill told her. “Whoever did this to Vilma. Nobody else’ll get in trouble.”

  She looked at him.

  “I tell you, Miss Hanlon,” he said, his voice very quiet, “nobody else.”

  “So,” Bill said, “who is this boy Joe? Her special friend?”

  She hesitated again. Nobody hurried her.

  “Blake,” she said. “Joe Blake. He went to school with her, I guess. He’s got some kind of a florist shop. That always seemed sort of—” She stopped.

  “Sort of what?” Bill said. He guessed. “Funny?” he said. “Inappropriate?”

  “I guess so,” the girl said. “He isn’t a sissy, like you’d expect. He’s more the other way.”

  “Tough?”

  “Sort of crude,” the girl said. “He’ll say things he hadn’t ought to say in front of ladies. You know?”

  “Right,” Bill said. “He didn’t like Vilma to go with other men?”

  “He wanted them to get married,” Alicia said. “I told you that.”

  “Of course,” Bill said. “I remember. You think he’d have been sore if Vilma went to lunch with a man at the office?”

  “Not if it was just some kid,” she said, “some boy she worked with. But this was an older man. Sort of her boss, wasn’t he? I guess Joe wouldn’t like that.”

  Weigand said nothing for a moment. The Brooklyn detective waited for him to go on and, when he did not, asked his own question. His voice was almost as quiet as Bill’s had been.

  “This Joe,” he said, “this Joe Blake. He knew where Miss St. John worked, of course?”

  “Surely,” the girl said.

  “He’d been there, probably? Picked her up after work? That sort of thing?”

  “Surely,” the girl said. “If they were going to a show. At one of the big houses.”

  “Do you know where Joe lives?”

  “That I don’t know,” she said. “His shop’s over in New York, but I think he lives over here.”

  Nobody spoke then for several minutes. The girl waited, looking from one face to another. She seemed to sense that they were waiting for Bill Weigand, so she spoke to him.

  “Listen,” she said, “I got to work tomorrow. I got to get some sleep.”

  “Oh,” Bill said. “Sorry, Miss Hanlon. Of course.” He looked around the little living room. “Here?” he said.

  “Not on your life,” she said. “Catch me. I’ll call up a girl friend. All right?”

  “Of course,” Bill said. “We’ll take you where you want to go, Miss Hanlon.”

  They took her where she wanted to go, which was not far. They rolled back through the June night, across Brooklyn Bridge, to the Homicide offices. A pick-up order went out for Joe Blake, owner of a florist shop somewhere in Manhattan, special boy friend of Vilma St. John.… Perhaps it was a start.

  Stein went off duty, on Bill Weigand’s order. Weigand and Mullins went over reports—reports reflecting a start in a different direction.

  From the ferry houses, the railroad stations, the bridges and the tunnels—nothing. There was no surprise in this. Dorian would not have walked through a train gate, sat in a car seat where the light would fall on her face, and even if she had they might have missed her. A certain car, a certain license number, a man “well known to the police”—these might be caught in what the newspapers had, for the most part, been ridiculed out of calling a “drag-net.” Not a girl held on the floor of a car, locked up in the trunk of a car—or, more probably than anything else, not being taken anywhere but either held somewhere in a room or—

  Bill thought of the strangled girl in the Brooklyn flat. His fingers ceased tapping on his desk; he looked at nothing.

  “
O.K., Loot,” Mullins said. “We’ll find her.”

  “Sure,” Bill said. “Sure, sergeant.”

  He went back to the papers. One of the Lavery boys had been picked up, had denied knowing anything about anything and was being held as a vagrant. (He wore a sharply tailored suit which had cost him a hundred and fifty; he wore a wrist watch worth twice as much and had five fifty-dollar bills with the lesser notes in his wallet; he described himself, unsmilingly, as a laborer.) He would, Bill decided, keep until morning. The “counselor” had called in, huskily, from a telephone booth. He said it didn’t look like being any of the Lavery boys; he said that a lot of the boys did seem to know about it, but only in a general way. He had returned to his listening.

  Mrs. Gerald North had telephoned at 11:05, been told that Lieutenant Weigand was out and had said it didn’t matter, she’d call back in the morning.… A woman living in a tenement between Second Avenue and First had reported to the police seeing a couple of men carry a large object across the sidewalk a few doors up—she was leaning out of her window on the second floor, getting a breath of air—and stuff it in the back of the car. She was sure it was a body. (People saw a great many things in New York and told some of them to the police, who listened but very rarely found basis for action. In this case, the woman probably had seen men carrying out a week’s laundry, or moving belongings from one tenement flat to another.) Normally this report would not have come to Homicide; at the moment everything was coming.

  The Missing Persons Bureau was beginning, already, to get answers to their six-state alarm. Most of them were obviously useless, wrong as to description, impossible as to place and time. The others were being checked. (One check led to the discovery of a girl missing six weeks from her home in Pittsburgh. She was very angry.…) The formal report listing Wilming’s death as “suspicious” had come along in due order. As a result, a routine check was being begun on all now known to have been in any way involved with Wilming. The check would widen out—and out. It was too soon for anything to have come of it, and nothing had.